Posted by Trisha on December 06, 2010

You've all heard everything there is to hear about this summer blockbuster, right? This is one case where the hype is more than justified. But rather than sing the novel's praises once again, I'll let Justin Cronin take it from here with some quotes about his vampire-novel-with-a-twist that I couldn't fit in to our June interview:

This is a book about how human beings lose their way. How humanity can get lost. The experiment that produces the great viral cataclysm is essentially an act of human greed—it’s trying to steal the future from your kids. The scientists who are seeking to engineer a virus that makes human beings so long-lived that they are essentially immortal have missed the true immortality that we possess, which is that the future we will not live to see is the future our children will live in. This is essentially the story of a world that has forgotten its children and needs to mend this broken chain. . . . .

The circumstances of my book are extreme, but they are versions of what happen to us all the time. Fear of the dark, you don’t know what’s out there. You get the bad moods at some point in your life. But in the meantime, the people in that place, they live in constant and overwhelming danger, but they have a job, they have families, they form relationships, they have a sense of clan and kin. They know the world that they know, and within that they assemble themselves domestically. So the world as we know it has in some way continued. It’s at the brink, and there’s not much left, but it’s there.